The way books, even books for teenagers, are marketed grows ever more irksome. So many of them are sold as clever cocktails of other people's successes - 'so-and-so meets such-and-such in the funniest and most touching novel since X or Y' - that you begin to wonder if they aren't commissioned by committee. Cross Your Heart, Connie Pickles (Puffin £4.99, pp247), Sabine Durrant's first novel for teenagers, is a case in point. Apparently, it is the cunning love child of a 'younger Bridget Jones' and Anne Fine which, according to the annoyingly gushy blurb on its cover, means that it is a) laugh-out-loud funny and b) highly perceptive. It also has - oh, please, no - 'instant girl appeal'.

Grrr! as Bridget Jones Snr might have put it. Happily, not even the worst excesses of Puffin's publicity department could ruin the pleasure of this novel. I fell in love with Connie Pickles immediately, not least because she is a Nancy Mitford fan (our heroine, who is 14 going on 40, is reading The Blessing). She also has a stationery fetish, which is always a good thing.

Pickles's plight is this: she is in possession of a very beautiful, French mother but, alas, no father or even stepfather. Mother, you see, is a bad picker. Connie's father, now deceased, was an actor who spent most of his time delivering pizzas, and her stepfather has committed one too many infidelities (plus he is a great one for dodgy schemes, such as delivering 'fresh' fish door-to-door). There is nothing for it. Connie and her friend, Julie, will just have to do the picking for her.

Cross Your Heart, Connie Pickles is a dream of a read, all gossip and kooky plot lines set against - if you can imagine such a thing - the far-off rumble of the Iraq war. It is humane, sweetly funny, delightfully done. But does it have 'instant girl appeal'? You know, I think it probably does. Certainly, it hooks you in and makes you smile in a way that two other new novels, both of which cover similar territory, simply do not.

Being Bindy (Faber £6.99, pp197) by Australian author Alyssa Brugman is about two best friends, Bindy and Janey, who fall out. Then the unthinkable happens. Bindy's father starts dating Janey's mum. Brugman has an appealing, pared-down prose style, but her characters feel like types rather than people.

This, sadly, is a novel that is powered by plot alone, though Bindy's mother, a woman so selfish she neglects to tell her children their grandmother has died, is deliciously horrible.

Another mother-figure appears in Catherine Johnson's preachy, box-ticking Face Value (Oxford £4.99, pp282), which is about teenage modelling, the dangers of. Lauren is spotted by an agency scout during a school trip to an art gallery. Unfortunately, she lives with her mother's best friend, Nessa, who despises modelling for the rather good reason that, as a result of it, Lauren is an orphan. (Lauren's mother was a model and much good it did her.)

Face Value's ludicrously improbable storyline - to ape the people at Puffin, it's Absolutely Fabulous meets The Bill - only heightens the feeling that Johnson is clinging opportunistically to the back of TV shows such as Model Behaviour, in which wan girls jump through hoops for the benefit of Rachel Hunter. No doubt many teenagers are fascinated by modelling, but that doesn't mean they are dumb enough not to notice when they are being given a lecture.

I couldn't get on with Bali Rai's The Whisper (Corgi £4.99 pp263), which carries a dreary warning: not suitable for younger readers. Guns, gangs, drugs: all these things can be found here and I didn't find any of them terribly edifying or even terribly convincing. Luckily, I was able to take refuge in Hide & Seek (Canongate £9.99, pp284), a first novel by Clare Sambrook. In its way, this book is just as full of menace as The Whisper, for all that its central character is a middle-class nine-year-old called Harry Pickles. But my God, it is beautifully done, probably the best book of its kind since (uh-oh, I am indulging in publicity speak again) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

'The grown-ups held an inquiry,' it begins, 'into how a child came to disappear, but they didn't name names like they do when children let grown-ups down. They talked about a catalogue of errors as if mistakes were something that turned up in the post and got paid for later.' If these two sentences don't make you want to read on, then just take my word for it: this is a seriously good novel for children and adults. It will creep into your readerly nooks and crannies like ivy up an ancient wall.